Damien Mulley

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But the half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

Quote from the Sandman by Neil Gaiman.

Tomorrow night is the night!

What a great song. This is Owen Pallett. He helped do strings for Arcade Fire. I loved this song the second I heard it. Already ordered his debut album. Pitchfork Profile. The great news? He plays Whelan’s on May 14th. So so so soooooo there.

Anyone know if there are any Irish blogs on agriculture or rural life?

I’m currently trying to get someone to build a coverage map for broadband in Ireland. It will list every enabled exchange and have a 5km radius around each exchange to show max coverage. I have the locations of all exchanges but need someone to plot them on a map of Ireland now. Can anyone help with this? Looking to have this done by Thursday if possible.

UPDATE: I’ve posted what I’m looking for here.

Scoble says if your name isn’t on the list you’re not getting in. Scoble was once boastful about not moderating comments and very very very rarely deleting them. Now he’s become an editor of the thoughts of others and if he doesn’t like your comment he’ll delete it. I’m sure we’ll all be comforted with a new suckup cartoon from Hugh Macleod that’ll make everything better.

Google, Amazon and Ebay tell AT&T to make their day, punk! About time. So, in case anyone wasn’t aware the large telcos like AT&T wanted to blackmail the large web traffic generating sites to pay them to bring customers to them. Nevermind they are already payed to do this, the greedy telco dinosaurs now wanted premiums from Google and Amazon and EBay, three hugely wealthy companies. The worrying issue here is that with Washington being what it is, the telcos are lobbying hard and might just get their way with the FCC being almost as bad as the Irish Telecoms regulator.

Imagine charging people a road toll and then charging them differently depending on which shop they’ll be visiting, even if all shops are in the same location. That’s what AT&T want. The Networking Pipeline I referenced above is now speculating that Google, Ebay and Amazon might just route around AT&T and buy chunks of wireless spectrum and provide customers with an alternative way of getting online. Kinda cool that a principle of the ‘net is to route around damage and that’s what Google et al might just do. Google has already been buying up a lot of dark fibre and hiring dark fibre experts. They have also been investing in broadband over powerlines (won’t happen) and they are playing now with wireless networks in San Fran and Mountain View. GoogleNet is much closer than we thought.

Greg Knauss makes a great blog post over on Kottke about referential and experiential bloggers. So, what be they? He says:

The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere … They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.

The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion … They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.

Very valid points. I think when it comes to these ideas I’m a bit of both. I use other blog posts as jumping points into deeper discussions on my own blog, these blog posts are catalysts for thought reactions but I also have linking posts that send people away from my site. “Nothing to see here today, go here and play instead.” I’d actually think a lot of bloggers are a mix of both types more than excusively one or the other. Still it’s a good observation by Greg on the various behavioural types of bloggers. I mostly started off as a referential blogger using my blog as link log and added some comments then over time I used it to express ideas I was thinking about and as Greg outlined, added links more as a way of enforcing my thoughts and ideas. I’ve noticed some people start like this whereas some have started as experiential and evolved into referential blogs.